[fruchtose]

Reddit communities are a minefield, at least in terms of the larger subreddits; Reddit is a site which has a significant young, male, socially liberal audience that is suspicious of advertisers. On Reddit, companies are seen as inauthentic, because people pushing a product cannot contribute to a community that was created without a profit motive (i.e. Reddit). For many users, this suspicion extends to corporations as a whole, since the profit motive poisons any interaction a company has with consumers; any interaction is dismissed as inauthentic. This sense of cynicism has become pervasive throughout the site, such that any self-promotion is questioned, even when money is not at stake.

And EA thought it would be a good idea to advertise on Reddit? I can sympathize with the team members who have no control over the business decisions. I am sure they are great at making awesome games. However, a cursory search of Reddit would show that more vocal Redditors hold extremely hostile views of EA's games and business practices; these opinions cover such grounds as studio acquisitions, DRM, game quality, content distribution methods, DLC pricing schedules, and artistic vision--just to name a few topics of scorn. Given the extensiveness of the Reddit echo chamber, I wonder who at EA made the brave decision to send the SimCity 5 team into it.

[redthrowaway]

Reddit also has a fairly dim view of IE, but that didn't stop the IE9 team from having a fairly successful AMA[1]. The difference was, the Redmond boys owned up to past failures and seemed genuinely interested in fixing them. EA's response to customer dissatisfaction appears to be to claim that they're wrong, and should not be dissatisfied. Two different approaches led to two entirely different outcomes.

An AMA on reddit can be successful for anyone, so long as they're primed on how best to interact with the reddit community. Obama was well-primed, and his inclusion of several reddit in-jokes in his replies (no doubt at the insistence of staffers) made for a very successful AMA, even if it was an easy crowd for him. On the other hand, Woody Harrelson should also have faced an easy crowd, but his ignorance of what's expected in an AMA led to that infamous clusterfuck.

EA should have known that online-only DRM would be a big issue, and they should have prepared a better answer to it. That they didn't is only their fault, especially given what I suspect is fairly high reddit usage among the rank and file there.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...

[wlesieutre]

Last year I had a few weeks between real internet connections at my house, and it really drove home how bad an idea these systems are. Even Steam, which ostensibly has an "Offline Mode" did not do as well as I'd have liked because one of the residents didn't have it set to log in automatically.

So now we're in a situation where all of her games refuse to open and we won't be back online for a while. But you'd think Steam would have no problem authenticating through a tethered EDGE connection. It's not a ton of data, and it doesn't need low latency. But it didn't work. Even if webpages loaded (albeit not quickly), Steam would not log in.

So it strikes me as incredibly arrogant for companies like EA and Ubi to come along and tell me that these always online systems aren't a problem. They are. And it sucks how many users accept them. Even when we're not talking about days/weeks like I discussed above, small Comcast outages here are not uncommon, and it's crazy that games will quit or entirely refuse to run when they happen.

I absolutely agree that they should have seen the reaction coming. The same kind of systems have been in place with games like StarCraft 2 and Assassins Creed, and they've all gotten similar receptions on sites like Reddit.

[redthrowaway]

It's interesting that you had issues launching Steam games without an Internet connection. I've never had a problem with it, although I've got a MBP and so my library of games is quite limited. Might the issue have not been Steam, but rather something the game publishers had included that caused it not to work?

[wlesieutre]

If you have Steam set to remember your password and log in automatically, it's fairly reliable. If you prefer to not leave passwords remembered, Steam will not launch even in Offline Mode until you restore the connection and authenticate. This is by design.

http://i.imgur.com/NXCpk.png

While I understand the reasons for designing it this way, it's still very annoying to be caught off guard by it. I'm glad that nobody could get access to any actual account data like my friends list, time played, etc. But I'd much rather it be a system like the Mac App Store, where software will run no matter what once it's been downloaded, and running things I've installed is entirely separate from my account authentication and anything with personal information in.